Last night I posted on my author page on Facebook that I learned how to spell Banana

I was ridiculously excited and overjoyed at yet another word I could spell correctly; I had to share it with everyone I know. This included my work friends, who most do not know that I am Dyslexic. My excited news was laughed at, which is fine but then the questions rolled in.

Co-worker: If you’re dyslexic, do you read words backwards?

Me: I have never read a word backwards my entire life. The letters just look jumbled sometimes.

Co-worker: If you’re dyslexic, how do you write such good emails?

Me: I write it in Microsoft Word and abuse the spell check.

Co-worker: If you didn’t use spell check, how bad is your spelling?

Me: Let me show you!

I started keeping a notebook of all the words I frequently misspell and showed them to my co-workers. I proudly call this notebook:

My Dyslexic Spelling Guide

One co-work remarked: That’s crazy! You almost have all the letters there, they’re just jumbled.

Me: That’s what I said. Or I spell them the way I sound them out. Which is a problem because,

Some sounds, sound the same to me.

And I can’t distinguish the differences.

Awhile back, I had been using my Twitter account for my Dyslexic Spelling Of The Day. I stopped because I couldn’t keep up with all the drama I had going on in my daily life. I planned to get back to it one day with a fresh new take. The deciding factor for returning to Twitter with D.S.O.T.D. was a ten minute in-depth conversation about the spelling for:

Dissection

I did not recognize this word “Dissection,” or knew the meaning of it. I didn’t have a dictionary nearby and I seriously forgot that Google existed. I was trying to explain to my friend how I was a little upset that he would send me a word I didn’t know and he needed to give me definition, because Microsoft Word synonyms didn’t help me understand any better.

I told him I was trying to spell, “The word that you use when cutting up a frog in science class. I can’t spell it.” I spelled what I thought it was two different ways:

Disection / Diesection

Long story short: Dissection was the word I was looking for. I had just never seen it before. And if I have, it is not an word I encounter often enough to recognize.

This episode of spelling madness reignited my want to share these kinds of experiences. So I have decided to restart my D.S.O.T.D with a brand new hashtag.

Here’s the first post of my revitalized Twitter:

Dyslexic Spelling Of The Day:

Deslexic & Dislexic = Dyslexic

#DyslexicSpellingGuide